For years, one of my businesses has been a regular user of Wise (formerly TransferWise). Wise is a financial service that lets you send and receive money across currencies, often at a better rate and lower fee than traditional banks. Sounds great, right?
Until it isn’t.
This is our story – a sobering, frustrating, and frankly appalling experience that ended with our business and personal accounts being shut down, without any meaningful reason, support, or recourse.
And all we did? We updated our address.
🏢 A Routine Change Turned Nightmare
Like many businesses, we recently moved into a new office. Alongside the usual updates to suppliers and records, we updated our physical address with Wise. Not long after, we received an email requesting us to verify the new address.
Fair enough – we had no problem with that.
Wise provided a dropdown list of acceptable documents: a lease agreement, rates notice, tax document, utilities bill, or telecommunications bill. Due to our company structure, most of those documents are in the name of our parent company or show our PO Box (which NZ Post requires, since they won’t deliver to our street address). But we had a telecommunications bill that ticked every box:
Correct entity name ✅
Correct physical street address ✅
... continue reading